Weather Eye: April showers bring up earthworms

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April showers are making the ground soaking wet again — and bringing up the earthworms. Folklore says that worms are so sensitive to rain that they can forecast showers: “If many earthworms appear, rain will follow.” But why do earthworms come to the surface at all when it rains?

The idea that they come up to avoid being drowned is a myth. Worms have no lungs and instead take oxygen directly through their skin, either from air or water, and experiments at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) revealed that earthworms can survive for weeks underwater. Another theory is that a

Winter is officially drawing to a close today and despite the ups and downs in
temperature it was a fairly average winter, overall — so much for the
three-month Arctic freeze that some newspapers had predicted